The God Tube Uncovering the Hidden Spiritual Message in Pop Culture

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Beginning with The Simpsons and ending with The Da Vinci Code, the entertaining sections in this book uncover profound philosophical and religious ideas in pop culture. Each work covered contains a challenge to both standard religious orthodoxy and secular science. In The Simpsons Movie, although Homer must be dragged off his couch to church, he experiences a spiritual epiphany with an Inuit shaman woman. In the film of The Da Vinci Code, Robert Langdon proposes that the human is the divine.” The author makes a striking case here for pop culture as a hotbed of alternative thinking.

James Lawler is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of The Existentialist Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre (1976) and Matter and Spirit: The Battle of Metaphysics in Modern Western Philosophy before Kant (2006).

Introduction

p. vii

Between Duty and Desire: Morality in The Simpsons

p. 1

From Illusion to Reality: The Matrix of the Good Society

p. 26

The Multidimensional Universe of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

p. 60

Blinding the Eyes of Justice: Woody Allen's Tale of Crime and Punishment

p. 87

Realizing the Highest Good: The Power of Love in the Matrix Trilogy

p. 117

Dialectics of the Force in Star Wars

p. 141

Turning to the Dark Side: The Problem of Evil in Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Darth Vader